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Shortly after the launch of the iPhone in 2007, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said there was "no chance" of Apple's new smartphone gaining significant market share. Computerworld predicted an early-adopter spike followed by unspectacular sales like Apple's earlier flop, the Newton.
We all know how those predictions fared. Fifteen years later, iPhone accounted for a fifth of all smartphones shipped and 85% of global smartphone operating profit.
At a 2023 shareholder meeting, Elon Musk said Tesla would likely sell between 250,000 and 500,000 Cybertrucks every year. During a 2023 earnings call, he described Cybertruck reservation demand as "so far off the hook, you can't even see the hook." Future Fund Managing Partner Gary Black argued that Tesla's new truck would produce a halo effect on Tesla's entire lineup.
Compared to those lofty statements, Cybertruck has been a flop. For a company that sold slightly more than 1.6 million vehicles in 2025, Tesla only sold around 20,000 Cybertrucks last year.
Two CEOs, One Claim About Research
When asked about customer research before launching Cybertruck, Musk commented that there was no customer research. He's told audiences on several occasions that he does zero market research. As a former automotive marketer, that strategy feels like a dangerous way to conduct business.
Yet, Steve Jobs told Business Week nearly 30 years ago that it was hard to design breakthrough products using focus group research. Jobs believed that people often don't know what they want until it's shown to them.
During the 2012 Apple v. Samsung trial, Apple's marketing chief Phil Schiller told the court that the company uses no customer surveys or focus groups to shape the development of its products before they're launched to the public.
Musk skipped market research for Cybertruck. So did Jobs for iPhone. Cybertruck sales have disappointed. iPhone success is arguably unmatched in corporate history.
Is there anything to be learned from this paradox?
The Resistance Inside Both Companies
There is. A more useful question, however, is what each CEO did when someone inside his own company questioned the product.
Tesla chief designer Franz von Holzhausen told Musk biographer Walter Isaacson that "a majority of the people in this studio hated [Cybertruck]." Engineers built a more conventional truck design on their own. Their concern wasn't that Cybertruck wouldn't work. It was that it looked bad. By Isaacson's account, Musk had little patience for the concern and no interest in running the design past anything resembling a focus group.
At Apple, there was internal resistance as well to an iPhone prototype. This prototype was controlled by a version of the iPod's click wheel. Using the click wheel for dialing and texting was clumsy in actual use, a functional failure rather than an aesthetic one.
Fixing that functional problem produced something that turned out to be magical. When Jobs saw the resulting multitouch prototype, he reportedly said, "My god, we can build a phone out of this." The multitouch screen that solved the usability problem became the most recognizable design element of the iPhone, an unbroken glass face with no buttons at all.
What Was Actually Different?
For Musk, skipping Cybertruck market research was not the problem. It was what he ignored when someone in his own organization told him he was wrong about Cybertruck design.
The harder discipline that Jobs practiced with the iPhone was listening to someone in the room who says no, and being willing to throw out your own idea because of it.
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